International detention of Polish hackers “for hire”. They were pursued by Europol and the FBI

The team of the Department of the Central Bureau for Combating Cybercrime in Bydgoszcz, in cooperation with the local District Prosecutor’s Office, tracked down and detained two men (Mateusz B. and Damian Sz.) suspected of offering illegal hacking services. Police officers carried out activities “in close cooperation” with Europol, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the police of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, and the activities were coordinated by the J-CAT (Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce) –

The police detained two Polish hackers. They made money from DDoS attacks

As , hackers have been operating since at least 2016 (and according to CBZC findings since 2013) and have been dealing with DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, which “significantly disrupted the operation of the attacked IT systems.” These are attacks that disrupt the work of websites by sending thousands of simultaneous requests (by bots), which ultimately lead to clogging of free server resources and failure. Hackers were hired by entities interested in such an attack, and they accepted remuneration for their services only in cryptocurrencieswhich made it difficult to trace. The cybercriminals’ service was blocked this year as part of the international “Power Off” operation, and then closed by the decision of the US District Court for the Central District of California.

As part of their activities, the investigators searched ten apartments and secured data from the perpetrators’ server, which was located in Switzerland. They also managed to find over 35 thousand. user accounts, 76 thousand. log-in records to the platform and over 320,000 unique IP addresses of the attacked servers. In addition, 11,000 saved attack plans, for which the criminals were to receive approx. 400,000. dollars (PLN 1.63 million) and e-mail addresses assigned to each customer. In addition, a log containing over a thousand consecutive attacks for 44,000 was also secured. dollars (almost PLN 180,000). It is not clear whether the hackers documented all the DDoS attacks they carried out in this way, or whether this data only applies to some of them. On the computer of one of the detainees, there was evidence of running and administering the criminals’ domain.

In the course of the operation, computer equipment of considerable value and cash were also seized. That’s 15 hard drives and 5 flash drives, 5 desktops and 6 laptops, 10 mobile phones and 3 SIM cards. A printout from a cryptocurrency wallet was also found, which contained over 114,000. zlotys (1 BTC and 1 BCH) and over 145 thousand. PLN in cash. The total value of the property secured by the prosecutor’s office against future penalties was almost PLN 260,000. zlotys. The hackers were placed under police surveillance and bail, and were banned from “managing the disputed domain and its modifications, as well as from conducting the activities described above,” the prosecutor’s office describes. They face up to 5 years in prison.